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Y’all might have heard about “if a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody to hear it, did it really make a sound?” Scientifically, the answer is yes because we know that when trees fall, they likely make a sound. But what does make a sound really mean? If you talk to a deaf person from behind them, you might as well not be talking. Yes, you are making sounds but to them, they can’t hear you, so you really aren’t. That’s their truth. Your truth is that you are making sounds. Truth is subjective.
Hundreds of years ago people believe the Earth is flat. That was the truth then. If you believed otherwise, you’d be ridiculed and honestly if someone told you that the Earth is round, others would find it very hard to believe, even if they wanted to. Convincing people would be really hard. In a sense, truth is what most people believe in. It’s what’s easily believable. It’s what can be expected to happen when the wave function collapses, what is the most likely outcome of something. That’s the truth.
Truth can also be different in different strata. Individuals might have different versions of truth. But none of that matters, it’s what the majority believe, that’s the truth. Take stock markets, what are they except crowd-sourced value predictors for a company? Imagine you believed something today individually, but everyone else believed something else. If what you believed was true, chances are, the idea got out into the world and it changed everyone’s thinking – like the Earth being round or flat. What matters in the end is what comes off of your belief. If you believe you can harness electricity from let’s say, the moon and we aren’t actually extracting electricity from the moon in a hundred, two hundred years, then that belief was not true. Nothing came off of it. If it did come to fruition and we did extract electricity from the moon, then it becomes the truth.
So the truth is two things, it’s what most people believe in and it changes with time.
I used to have dreams of grandeur – of a power-couple, think House of Cards, me pulling my weight and moving the world, her pulling her weight and shaping it in her own way. Both of us powerful in our own right. We’d rest at nights talking about how the world is ours for the taking when we’re older, and we’d lay with our heads together, our feet stretched in opposite directions with the camera from the ceiling rotating every so slowly, talking existence, societies, about love and dreams and what makes us wonder and what keeps us awake at night and what gets us melancholic. Then I loved.
Then I loved. At first the idea of her, being blinded by the juices coursing through your body is fun while it lasts but then it stops and you start seeing her faults. There are no faults, not really. You find the first thing to blame — for her not being the person who you imagined her to be. That opens it up, and, it washes both of you away. The mountain of joy that you climbed for half a year trips you over so hard. The mud washes down under your feet. You are standing in it, you’re slipping in it, you’re drowning in it. You fight, you hate her or you hate yourself. You are uncertain, you blame her, or if you did not build enough walls, you are okay for a little longer. I did, and I had to break down so many. I did not know a single one of these walls existed until I had gone through half of them. The other half are more deeply rooted, grown in, old and moldy, not even a wall anymore. They are part of the structure and breaking them could mean breaking everything you think you are, but you have to do it. Then I changed.
I had some comfortably timed life altering events at every turn to get me out of my routine and put me up to task. I broke walls and walls and walls and at the end I felt nothing. It was liberating. I wanted for nothing. I felt calm. I close my eyes, my eyes roll to their edges, the left to the left and the right to the right and I can see it in my mind’s eye, the final strings loosening and rolling out. It unfurls, no more knots. It hangs merrily in the wind, slowly fluttering. I was free.
She asked me once if I love myself and I drew a blank. I don’t love myself or hate myself. I feel nothing. I have a sense of self but when I try to define it my mind draws a blank again like it doesn’t want to. I try to define the blue water bottle in front of me, I’m able to. I look at my hands and try to define it, I can. I imagine my face and my hair and I can define them. But I cannot define myself if the question is if i love myself. She asked me then if I love her. I again felt nothing. And I knew I loved her then. Love doesn’t have to be powerful or raucous, it can be silent and calming. It can be nothing.
Now, why do I love? I love, to feel nothing. Being in a state of not wanting is not something you can easily get. People want something. All. The. Time. I want things too. All. The. Time. We fuel each other’s desires, me and her, and help each other get there or so we believe. But we also cool off each other’s engines off and feel empty, like we are complete, like we’ve reached our destination. It feels like we have too much in common and nothing in common at the same time. When we have things in common we go off of them and when we don’t, there is something between us that we are building, investing in and we look towards that, it’s not a baby or a house or anything of that sort. It’s shared existence, a shared life. It’s bigger than either of us and that keeps us going. And that’s why I love today.
Earth is a completely immersive, full-dive MMORPG. It provides a hardcore experience by going above and beyond standard full-dive. Instead of relaying signals into your braincase, Earth transports the user into an alternate braincase, completely cutting off signals from the users’ own braincase. This enables users to fully experience Earth, without the interference of thoughts or memories from outside Earth.
Earth is built on a hybrid client-server & blockchain model.
The client contains the base world and allows users to perform a set of actions. Assets for rendering the world, player models and animations and a variety of cyclic events are shipped with the client.
The server hosts a few blockchains of it’s own. These maintain data on all mutable entities of the world and are consulted for various user actions.
Blockchains are heavily leveraged. Each user stores their data in a parachain.
When the user first starts playing, they are “born” and allocated a parachain and a client interaction token. The client interaction token has a small set of randomized values. These values determine what actions the user is able to perform and the ease of performing these actions. Let’s assume every action has a scale between 1 – 10, the higher the better. Earth is a self regulating system, which means at any point 80% of the users are kept at a standard median value (usually between 4 – 6) and the other 20% are outliers outside the median. If the user performs the jump action, and the standard jump as defined by the server is 1 meter and the user is a 5 pointer in the jump department, then squarely the user performs a jump action for 1 meter plus or minus a random variance as defined by the server. The user performs all actions that they want by interacting with the client via the client interaction token. When an action is successfully performed, data blocks are generated in any observing user. This means the performer of the action always writes back data of any action that they perform in whatever capacity that they observe it from. Anyone else observing the user perform the action also records the action having happened. This model of authenticating user actions on the client by removing them from their standard braincase and routing brain signals via the sandboxed braincase provides inherent security that makes a seamless full-dive experience possible in Earth.
A large amount of data is generated as can be expected and various checks are in place to make sure Earth runs without lagging. Any experiences of lag could severely affect the user’s experience and as such it is of prime importance to handle data efficiently. To start with – the field of vision is limited to 180 degrees and only about 10% of this is usually focused to keep data processing to a minimal. A “center-in” algorithm is used with vision where several layers of the user’s parachains are pinged to make sense of the object perceived. This algorithm comes with the risk of the center sometimes moving towards the world in which the user is completely unable to place the object and the center moving towards the user’s ideas from data collated from user’s parachains result in what’s commonly known as schizophrenia.
User parachains as well as server parachains are organized as indexed graphs – multiple parachains indexed by a top level parachains. User parachains work slightly different because data stored in user parachains are not always stored to make sense. Almost 99% inputs received by the user braincase is almost discarded immediately. There’re two conditions for data to be stored – one is that the data conforms to an already identified pattern and as such easily indexed by the top level parachains and another being repetition or forced storage in which case a new sidechain in the top levels of the user parachains. Reference to data that is not accessed keeps getting colder and gets harder to access. No data is completely discarded however as indices might be added in a variety of ways that make seemingly lost chains reachable.
During the course of the game, users develop various skills and luck plays a huge role in advancement. The saying goes “in the right place, in the right time.” When a user practices a certain action they have the ability to progress in scale from their assigned values between 1 to 10. This is however governed by the server’s balance keeper which balances numbers. This means if someone is to progress to a rating of 7, someone else is degraded to a rating of 6 to make that happen. So practicing a skill / an action at the right time, enables a breakthrough / jump to the next rating level. The server keeps track of all user action progresses by recording relevant information in it’s blockchain.
One of the key achievements of Earth is that it’s a fully interactive and destructible world. Keeping to it’s hardcore roots, destruction is made extremely difficult but is made easier as the world progresses. A variety of actions can be performed such as grab, push, throw on a variety of objects. There are constraints on each object – action combo based on weight, power and such. When actions are performed on world objects, they are recorded in the server blockchain, provided enough observers were present. Decisions to store or not store event data is made on the fly based on how resource intensive the event is, what other events it triggers, how significant it is to advancing the story-line. For instance, a tree falling in the forest might not be recorded since it might hold no relevance. This is true especially if the particular tree is not referenced by any user parachains or is only found in several cold sidechains.
Event occurrence is similar to perception. It flows from both sides to the middle where a consensus is reached on what the event is. Let’s take the simple action of hammering a nail. When the hammer is swung down, the possibilities are computed on the other end, the future, and the various parameters required to make each of these possibilities a reality is computed based on current state (a result of previous events). Now when the action is initiated, a roll is performed to compute how favorable the result would be. Let’s assume a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the worst. If the user is completely unskilled in hammering a nail, the probability roll range is going to be severely skewed towards an unfavorable roll and one of the unfavorable actions are performed such as hitting the nail from the wrong angle and completely bending it. Roll favorability is also influenced by the general difficulty values that the user is assigned during initialization. Users on lower difficulty will generally get more favorable rolls and find it easier to perform the actions that they want, especially those that involved long term effort.
Do remember that when doing the roll for a skill for the first time, it’s most likely an off-shoot skill – that is it’s composed of various other primary skills. Hammering a nail, for instance is going to involve hand-eye coordination and knowing that you have to hit the nail square on it’s head. This is all straight-forward. Let’s move on to a case where multiple parties are involved.
Let’s take the case of an employee showing up late to work. To keep things simple, let’s limit the parties involved to the employee, the boss and their mother. Now, the employee is very thrilled for the next day and would absolutely love to be there on time. The boss however is not too sure, evidenced by previous events of tardiness. The mother also doesn’t think their offspring isn’t going to make it in time. The roll is made. Something to note here is that the employee doesn’t make the roll. The roll is made independent of the employee or anyone or anything else. It’s simply made to reach the next event. The roll goes through and a favorable roll lands for the employee – they are going to make it in time. But it has to be believable. So the parameters are pulled for the various options available for getting the employee in on time. One of them is that they used the public transport and reached on time. They were in-fact late for the bus thereby fulfilling the parameters – that is the perceptions of the boss and the mother, but it just so happened that the bus was also late. Various other parameters are pulled to make sure that this reality is possible – such as participants in traffic or the bus driver – whichever works and the event is written. Once the event is written, it’s simply acted out by the actors making the event a reality.
Accounts can go cold when users decide to stop. Since actions are limited and the world itself behaves in a very deterministic manner, it is easy to extrapolate actions that the user performs. As such, to keep the user experience uninterrupted, cold accounts are turned into NPCs. To account for this, user actions have been considerably limited and users are prone to form what is called habits. Every user inevitably forms them and since the system is designed for users to repeat actions, the world design also becomes simpler. Especially turning cold accounts into NPCs is made easier because of this early design decision. Since most users are stuck in a cycle of repeating the same actions for most of the time they are online, events carry more significance. NPCs are also made harder to interact with, with the client safeguards in place and some regions have more NPCs than others. A commonly observed effect of regions with a large population of NPCs is the metropolitan effect – swathes of people seemingly lifeless, going about their day every day.
Each user is allocated a drive, this is a limited quantity of action points that the user can expend to perform actions. Think of it as a rate-limiter token. This, along with a combination of other limiters such as energy and strength keep users wanting to come back and get further the next day. The client also feeds certain other responses to the user directly. This is removed from the sandboxed braincase, so the user “feels” them directly. Good actions release a dose of dopamine and the effects of this are controlled by the antithesis stimuli cortisol. A combination of these and other stimuli carriers which are fired in response to events keeps users engaged. How these are fired are also randomly decided per user and set during initialization.
Every lifecycle is given a certain predestined progression which is partially controlled by the initial values that the user is allocated but can go on to become wildly different based on the events the user’s parachain records. So in essence, depending on the type of user’s that the user in question decides to surround themselves with, they can, to a degree choose what events are going to go into their parachain and as a result can direct the path of their progression. Users also obviously control their own actions but due to client restrictions, it is generally hard to escape the predestined progression.
To keep things fresh, a rolling meta approach is taken with vertical and horizontal progression inside a single seed. Each seed can adopt different trajectories, and as such it is generally not plausible to transfer users between different seeds most of the time. But given enough commonalities, the consensus system can be manipulated to inject people from a world from one seed to a world from another seed. This is risky and usually produces memory and event warps but nonetheless, technically it is a possibility, and can be attempted if the divergence is within eligible limits.
Coming back the topic of rolling meta, at any point of time certain professions, certain user appearances and certain user demeanor are promoted by the balance keeper. Some metas might shift within a user’s lifecycle or be persistent across multiple generations. Meta shifts are usually marked by story-line changes more than anything else such as balance keeper’s number tweaks. About every 100 years, new enough story-lines are released to change how the world looked before and after. This is done gradually and consistently to avoid perception of tears in the fabric of reality.
Sometimes, bigger events such as the genocide, world wars 1 and 2, the 2008 financial crash or the coronavirus are also released to keep things interesting.
When a server gets depopulated, users might start getting seeded into existing NPCs to provide variety or the server might altogether stop accepting users and prepare for a server chain merge or a world event which marks the close of a server. Server chain merges are simple, if the users decide to continue playing, they lose their current progression but can choose to be placed in another seed world into a NPC which has the least divergence with their current progression and the current world. This process isn’t completely clean and can often times end up with users carrying blocks from their past parachain to the seed they are transferred to resulting in them having “memories from their past lives”.
Naturally, certain distributions exist and among these distributions, the world finds balance. A child is born to two extroverted parents; it could be expected that the child inherits these traits and is also extroverted as a result. But the case of children having wildly different traits is very common. Still, as far as a species goes, there is always this level of heterogeneity that is maintained. Even when the individuals of a species want to conform, we don’t reach the homogeneity that feels inevitable. This is because though we inherit some traits, a lot of the others are distributed at a species-level following what looks like superposition.
For a species that is evolving such as the human species, there is a 80:20 golden ratio-ish split that happens and spirals inwards and downwards. 80% of the species conform to certain traits and characteristics that the species considers safe. At any point in time, a balance is maintained to keep this 80:20 ratio intact. For instance, consider the famous Myers–Briggs Personality Indicator test. A certain distribution of personalities has been observed and expected to be found among the general populace, such as ISFJs being above 10% and INFJs being about 1%. Some people claim that their personality fluctuates between tests. These changes, deaths and births makes sure that the ratio is always maintained. Nobody does this, but it happens naturally.
Coming back to the 80 of the 80:20, 80% people are endowed with characteristics that the species considers safe for it’s survival. These are very stable traits that have proven to work for the survival of the species time and again. The other 20% – again has a 80:20 split and the 80% down here are again given stable traits but being a part of the minority, they are endowed with certain differences. The further down we go the 20%s, the rarer personality traits we observe. For example psychopaths are three tiers deep sitting at ~1% and serial killers might be 10 tiers deep making them rare. This ensures two things – that the species survives, and it thrives. If the base 80% of the species which have been endowed with “safe” traits dies, as a result of all of them making the same mistake, the species in general still survives as a result of the other 20%.
As we go down the 20% spiral, we see people who don’t feel rewarded when they perform things that the general populace does. These people feel the urge to be different and feel emotions such as embarrassment or disgust when they attempt to do the same things or express themselves in the same way that others around them do. They are forced to be different by something internal to them. With LGBTQ stuff taking center-stage, it’s becoming increasing obvious that the 20% in tier 1, the ones who are closest to the safe 80%, want to be recognized. They aren’t that removed from the characteristics of the safe 80% and crave social validation, but they do understand that they are different.
Now all that aside, the meat of the topic is that these distributions occur similar to superposition. If 30% of the population is set to be angry people, that distribution will remain. A concentration of angry people might be in one corner of the world at one point of time, and be in another at another point but to a degree it is random. The children of angry parents might not be angry. The friends of angry people might not be angry. Just because species distribution is done in such a way that there’s randomness and distribution ensures that certain numbers are hit and that goes beyond environmental or other discernible factors.
I walked an unfamiliar alley, metaphorically, of course, until I was led to the startlingly discovery of some meta information about the meta information I’m about to publish. Anyway, getting back to the matter at hand – the meta information.
Instruments such as alcohol among others can put you in a situation where acting a certain way is common-place, even for someone with the most closed personalities. They let loose a notch – of fear which is mostly the case but not limited to. Whatever had to be loosened, to make such a situation possible, has been loosened and the situation is on the cards, which drives the world to the inescapable act of the action happening or the situation playing out to it’s logical end. Now that it has happened once, the seemingly insurmountable wall has been torn down. And now that it has happened once, it is much easier – not to happen again – but rather, for the world to accept that it can happen again. The previously required circumstances are now no longer required to make the situation happen. It’s common-place.
What’s surprising is that it’s an environmental change that makes the situation common-place, as opposed to the actions of the single actor. In effect, the actor has effected such a huge change in mindset of everyone around them that it makes it easier for them to perform the action again. This drives at how people behave how the environment (society) expects them to and this is inescapable. To act out of character, is to effect such a large web of changes that it is almost impossible for an actor to pull off unless given some external help (cue winking face).
Now, there are also benefits that the actor gathers from the situation beyond the situation having played out itself. During the situation, as it is composed of time and the passage of time, experiences beyond what the senses perceive (as a possible result of previous cognitive and other experiences), are generated. From a bird’s eye view the situation has played out but there is the vast network of thoughts leading to experiences that go unseen. And a fleeting glimpse of the machinery is offered at these points in time to the actors. They can use this to draw parallels and go “Ah!”, if they so please. In the long term, the attainment of these seemingly obvious connections, hiding in plain sight, reshapes your rationale. You start thinking differently, you make a different set of decisions.
So, this one time, in a different life there was a point when I felt happy that I could feel sadness. I was like ‘Yay! Now there’s an emotion I can feel.” It was weird. I knew I was feeling less emotions than I used to. I realized that and felt happy for feeling something. I looked for shows with a sad ending and I got my shot of the feeling. I remember those shows fondly, for that way I could never feel again.
Anger, most people might say is a bad thing but what if there wasn’t any at all? It’s an emotion. It’s powerful. It forces you into action against something that you do not like and you probably get to change whatever it is you do not like when you express it. People say, don’t get excited too much. Don’t cry. What happens as you stop though?
When you don’t express emotions, you do not lose the ability to express the emotions, you lose the ability to even feel them. As you stop expressing anger, fewer things anger you and probably eventually none. When you don’t express sadness, when you don’t cry or feel sorrow, you become iron-hearted, but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean there’s sadness and you have manned up against it, you just don’t feel that way anymore to the same circumstances that might have made you sad before. Effectively you’ve lost the ability to feel the emotion. Humans adapt, there’s a long term adaptation that happens as information passed down through genes and there’s short term adaptation – our behavior. Anything vestigial gets cut off eventually. We probably once had a tail and we don’t now. When you mind figures it doesn’t want to feel this emotion anymore, it simply cuts it off.
Society is a brilliant concept. I mean how cool is it, that it is something that can control the masses. Brutish, unruly, bunch of barbarians all in neat ties and coats grinding away selflessly day after day for others, most of whom you hardly know.
The cogs keep getting added in, people spin and spin with other people spinning at their feet. Everyone is spinning and make others spin. Not much of thought is required. You don’t have to decide how to steer your life, it just happens. A general direction is given at every turn and corner. Someone instructs you, and you instruct someone else. Beautiful.
Is this going to be another one of rants on technology reaching you through a purely technological medium? Maybe. In a much narrow sense and a more focused area but not so much.
Has technology derailed my life, stripped me of my humanity? Nah, I never had those to begin with. I didn’t make small talk with my hoteliers nor my servers. I never bothered to know anyone’s name, worries or dreams. Now that I order food through an app, to be honest I probably interact with some people more than I used to. Since this is a one point of contact thing, I offer a smile while getting my food so yeah, maybe things are better even. But are they really!
Imagine you can topple someone’s livelihood with a click of a button. Well not quite, but you and a bunch of people 3 star someone, it’s already turning Black Mirror-ish. What if the eatery’s sales go down because of that. Because of missing out on a star. What if they have to shut down. It’s easy enough to do, especially when a business is struggling and setting up. They get eaten up by the big fish but it gets even harder for the guppies to grow when the internet knits the world tighter and pits them against opponents so much bigger.
How often have we found ourselves rushing to the comment section after we watched a good video, or a long page of dank memes. We have absorbed the information that was presented and it’s there somewhere at a top level, not yet assimilated, just floating. We read a comment, we know what to feel now. A little bit percolates. Two, three comments, and more and more opinions go in, not yours, but someone else’s. It’s like movies. They show you a superhero, then they show you a hundred people staring in open-mouthed awe. That’s when they prime you to feel awe. That was a one hour thing. This is happening every moment of our lives. No wonder it’s easy to control elections through social media. I make it a point for this reason, to never read reviews.
This probably doesn’t happen a lot or at all, but there might have been situations where you eat delicious food and want to praise or just let the cook know you appreciate it. That is completely lost in this process. Wait am I still talking about food delivery apps. This too isn’t actually a thing, because everyday the food people eat, comes from the hard-work of a farmer probably some 100 miles away who you’ll never see. The clothes we wear, the buildings we live in, everything comes in from social contracts. So is technology actually messing things up?
Chances are we probably meet more like-minded people now more than ever and engage in interesting conversations, activities and whatnot. But all this is just a facade. Liking a piece of music, a book, a something or the other? How big a part of one’s life does that really constitute. Conversations fizzle out if you do not get on to the banal and trite with as much vigor as when you speak of something that only you and the other person and not many others you have met, like. The ordinary, the everyday, that’s where life lies and if people can get into that then it’s all set. Technology in no way really impedes that. Did it make us lose focus? Yes. But it isn’t that hard to tear away from a screen for a minute longer.
A lot of us, maybe all of us must have faced the power flux situation. You are taking a walk and have to cross the road. There’s this vehicle coming at you like a charging bull. If the vehicle swerve’s just a little bit no one has to stop completely in their tracks. Both the pedestrian and the passenger could probably continue to move in more or less the same speed as before. But no! The vehicle is indeed coming at you like a charging bull. It doesn’t seem to empathise with you. It doesn’t seem to know that there could be no interruption in both your activities if it turns a wee bit.
Where does this dominance come from? Every motorist has probably had the experience of being a pedestrian, of crossing streets in bike and car ridden roads. Why do they assert that their task is of higher importance when it comes to a pedestrian. It can be observed that this does not happen in a Pedestrian-Pedestrian situation or a Passenger-Passenger situation. Motorists are very aware of other motor vehicles around them and how they should move in respect with the other vehicles around them.
It is fear!
Like how most of our activities are driven, this one too is motivated by fear, though in this case or any other for that matter, the fear might not be really apparent. It is simply a form of caution. People fall in like puzzles and so do their activities. If you’re throwing something at a person, the person’s probably gonna dodge it. If you’re going to make way for a vehicle, the vehicle isn’t going to stop.
What really has me wondering though is where the empathy that is exhibited in normal situations disappears to. Why do the motorists not see how both their tasks could go unhindered.
Just my Idiosyncrasies 